It is an overcoat day--bleaky and almost winter-like. A certain chill being pushed by a quiet wind has wounded its way through the air to mask the summer heat. It began last night and was unusually cold for a summer's night.

It is also unusually still. The constant buzzing of the air conditioners nestled into the various apartment windows of the building, in single file from top to bottom like marching soldiers, has stopped. Puddles of water settle on the ground.

Haven't heard the birds all morning nor the hissing neighborhood cats always quarelling outside for tidbits of food and other scraps. I lean out the window to observe then sometimes. They are pretty cute but hungry and skittish. They scramble to their little hideouts at the least sound. If you whistle to them or sound the usual cat call they look about madly, poised to run. But today, they are nowhere in sight. It really is quiet.

I wonder if Nature has made some kind of ghastly mistake but then, given the eratic nature of Nature, I know there is no mistake. It just is. Nature or God has commanded it so. Of course I'm not complaining just contemplating... I've been dying for the tentacles of the scorching heat to let go and it finally has.

The City can rest easy today. It probably is a great day for shopping downtown but I'll stay in and laze about the house. It's a great day for playing scrabble. I smile now as I think of the play on words between "scrabble" and "scramble" especially because HE usually says: "Let's play scramble!" Anyhow, last night I didn't join the others to play, didn't really feel like thinking and I like to win. I win now and again. But today, the unusualness of the weather inspires me.

I'll finish reading G.K. Chesterton's piece: On Lying In Bed. It's a pretty short essay in comparison to a short story and I've only gone through the first few paragraphs having liked thus far how he explains the great art of lying in bed. "Lying in bed" he says, "would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling...Michael Angelo was engaged in the ancient and honorable occupation of lying in bed that he...realized how the roof of the Cistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens." That, I'll finish reading today. Still haven't seen the cats...Perhaps today it will rain.

I love to take long drives with no particular route or destination in mind especially at nights after long days. Something about these night-time journeys calms me--the landscape perhaps--because it appears differently at night as it is transformed into something more mysterious, unique, almost anonymous, for one does not know it as well at night as opposed to when it is fully exposed to broad daylight.

To my mind, the images of the landscape at night are some of the most exquisit. From the distant splash of the Jersey lights bouncing on a stretch of the Hudson River across from New York -- reflecting some of the most interesting shapes and colors the eyes are ever likely to see, to the unexpected smokey trash can one passes on 42nd street, from which a large puff of smoke slowly rise to the air like a cobra in tune with a musical note.

As if that weren't enough, the neon lights nearby casts a thought-provoking image when intermingled with the smoke. Something abstract...something akin to good and evil. The stoplight allows me to observe the scenery from afar a while longer and then I move on along nature's course. People usually seek nature out for solace and peace. How many times have we in wanting to get away from the city, vacationed in places where one could literally hug nature? It is said that even the great poets and many a character in our favorite novels have usually returned to nature to "find himself," so to speak. Perhaps these night drives are calming because one is quite literally at work with nature, albeit negotiating its landscape on wheels.